Nice one Bull.

I’m thinking that your need to introduce the word ‘dictator’, itself redolent with hated and discredited political ideals, supports my findings that ‘leadership’ is, by contrast, a word almost entirely without common meaning.
Employing a sinister word to try and explain a positive concept demonstrates that ‘leadership’ has become so malleable a concept as to have no value at all.

In my view, ‘leadership’ has replaced ‘management’ as a concept, and with that so being, there is left a vacuum where ‘leadership’ used to be. This is a challenge to us all.

Part of the problem is status creep (former garbage collectors are now called health engineers). Another is the disappearance of men with morals and ethics worthy of leadership.

And this is driven by the psychopathologising of business culture since the early 1980s.Psychopaths such as the much-vaunted Al Dunlap destroyed the humanity of everything they touched, in the name of profit.Ken Lay and Michael Skilling along with others continued this, until the GFC hit, represented the apogee of psychopathic corruption.

By psychopath, I’m not talking axe murderers, but a complete absence of empathy – one of the key indicators of psychopathy.
A new word, sociopath, was recently coined to describe the kind of arsehole that kills off culture and humanity pursuing increased profits.

But sociopath is not a condition, it’s psychopathy pure and simple. The Hare 20 point Checklist covers it all. You may already be familiar with Hare.

The Hare Psychopathy Checklist, Revised (PCL-R) –

Factor 1: Personality “Aggressive narcissism”
? Glibness/superficial charm (Think – Gail Kelly, in all of these)
? Grandiose sense of self-worth (Think – highly visible in One Tel, World Comm, Enron and Wall Street generally)
? Pathological lying (Think – state and federal spin doctoring, now costing Labor $120 million a year)
? Cunning/manipulative
? Lack of remorse or guilt
? Shallow affect (genuine emotion is short-lived and egocentric)
? Callousness; lack of empathy (Think – ‘Our bank has to compete, the cost of borrowing has increased’)
? Failure to accept responsibility for own actions (Think- ‘My job is to maintain profits for shareholders’)

Today, psychopathic values (absence of empathy or wider social responsibility) have become normalised, not just throughout big business, but in healthcare, education and government.I say normalised, because it is no longer visible unless, like me, you are acutely aware of these things as a phenomenon.

I wonder if there is another way, or set of words, that could reframe your ideal leadership concept, one that may draw less on disgraced politics and more on noble ideals or individuals.
For example, finding a praiseworthy philosopher or social scientist … or an explorer.

For example, Nansen, who created the first pan-European passport for the post WW1 League of Nations and resettled up to 22 million refugees across war-ravaged Europe.
Is there empathy, courage, grand vision, energy, selflessness and phenomenal leadership in his example. And looking at the outcome, how many people benefited?

(Of course, his good work was undone because of the humiliation to Germany by the imposition of staggering war reparations. That created WW2.Again, another example where a focus on money alone instead of the wider human community leads nowhere but downhill to conflict or war.
China will be next, with their massive imbalance of males to females (through Mao’s one-chold policy and the male cultural hegemony). Before all recent wars, significant male over-population has obtained. What to do with too many males, competing for too few females?)

So there is your challenge – a new word for a noble concept that sidesteps old stereotypes to establish a new idea, a new discussion.